Senior Director, Database Reliability Engineering

Avalara•UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

18h

About The Position

The Senior Director, Database Reliability Engineering owns architecture, reliability, and strategy for Avalara’s global Database Engineering function. The team manages thousands of databases across dozens of products, including SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, Confluent Kafka, Redis, and Snowflake, across AWS, GCP, OCI, and Azure. This role leads a distributed engineering organization across regions and time zones, supporting active-active applications in the US, EMEA, Brazil, and India with demanding low-latency and high-throughput requirements. It has end-to-end responsibility for the multi-cloud data stack and a mandate to modernize through AI-driven automation and self-healing systems. The role partners with Reliability Engineering peers and teams in Platform, Product SRE, Sustainment, Network, and the Engineering Operations Center to advance an automated, AI-enabled global architecture. It reports to the VP, Site Reliability Engineering.

Requirements

Significant database engineering or SRE experience, including transforming DBE technology and processes into an AI-integrated solution.
A self-motivated engineering mindset and ability to operate independently at a strategic level and set direction.
Experience leading a globally distributed team as a manager of managers while also contributing as an individual contributor.
Multi-cloud experience across at least two or three of AWS, GCP, OCI, and Azure, including architecture, migration, and cost management.
Deep technical fluency across relational, document, streaming and caching, and cloud data platforms.
Proven experience architecting low-latency, high-throughput, active-active, multi-region systems.
A track record of driving automation maturity, ideally including AI/ML-assisted operations or self-healing systems.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience using AI and AI-related technologies and willingness to apply AI to business challenges, stay current with trends and best practices, and share learnings.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI/ML-assisted operations or self-healing systems.

Responsibilities

Set architecture strategy that balances low latency, high throughput, reliability, and cost across multi-cloud environments.
Lead investment in AI-assisted automation and self-healing systems to reduce manual toil and improve reliability at scale.
Own observability, capacity planning, access management, and audit practices across database platforms, partnering with security to protect data.
Participate directly in high-severity incident calls, providing technical direction and escalation support.
Mentor managers and senior engineers, and lead hiring and talent growth for the Database Engineering organization.
Influence architecture and technology decisions across engineering beyond the direct team.
Partner with Reliability Engineering peers, Data Science and BI, Security, Architecture, and Development to build the Avalara data platform.